


Clad in Black

by TulipQ



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21724972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TulipQ/pseuds/TulipQ
Summary: Noir style one-shot story that plays with alternative interpretations of Taylor's power.
Kudos: 4





	Clad in Black

There is a Dragon in Brockton Bay. He had gotten to be like this because of cocaine and a strange water kaiju wrecking his home in Japan. Maybe aliens were involved, maybe it was God, the Dragon called Lung did not care. Honestly, his name ought to have been more like Ryu or Ta-Tu or even Long with something on an accent on the o. But whatever is in the name, the Dragon was in the body of a man, but always ready for a fight.  
The Dragon of the Bay was a cruel sort of fellow. He had lived a cruel life ever since he stopped just being a man and became a dragon living in the body of a man, but his evils were much better known than his pains. Perhaps the Dragon was too keen to keep the pain hidden so that he could ensure none knew his weakness, or maybe he was just a fool. Either way, a hero was going to have to slay this Dragon; he had just murder a group of young adults between the ages of 15-20 in spectacular fashion.  
The hero that stepped out to kill this Dragon was a slender, narrow in physical presence at least. But the hero knew that the Dragon posed no threat.  
She walked up to his place of power, where his two closest allies would be there to guard him and watch each other while he took his brief rest in the early morning hours.  
Bakuda's traps detected the hero approuching, and she let out a cry "Some dumb fuck thinks they can get the jump on Lung. Oni, they came in through the window on the second floor, eastside, take them out." and with that an alarm went out throughout the warehouse and the attached lofts.  
The demonic one put himself where the trap maker said the intruder was. Or at least he tried. He found himself instead in the same room as his boss, angry from being disturbed in what meager sleep he could get.  
Oni Lee sought to placate his master: "Boss," he said "I... I wasn't aiming for this room, we got some kind of Trump out there and they can fuck with me, what should I do?"  
The Dragon was outraged at the interruption to his sleep, at the idiocy of his underling, at himself for not having better allies, and most of all at the intruder. He decided to simply handle the matters as his true self, and thus the man became the Dragon he was on the inside.  
Or so he had hoped. The changes started to come about, but then the shift stopped dead. The voice of rage was not with the Dragon anymore and he could not speak in his true voice. At first he thought this was just his power being negated, but then he realized he had been shrinking instead of growing, weakening instead of empowering, growing cold inside when he ought to have a great fire. He tried to calm himself down, but the feeling of cold and weakness was pissing him off and being pissed off was chilling his blood and weakening his muscles.  
"Bakuda must kill the intruder. Power inversion it seems," spoke the Dragon in a small voice, trying to maintain that laconic manor that made him seem in control at all times despite his utter lack of physical strength.  
The demonic one tried to go to the trap master with his normal manor, only to find himself falling into the cold ocean waters. He would make it back to shore in some time, but not before the actions of the night were over and the demon concluded seeking the Dragon would mean being executed for failure. He thus never sought the Dragon, but he would not die that day either.  
Within the warehouse, the Dragon stumbled over to the door, seeking to escape whatever it was that was making him feel like he was dying to his own rage. He then said, "BAKUDA! Oni Lee is dead to us. Kill the intruder. No new devices. No using your genius. Only existing bombs." The words got smaller and less impressive as they came out; fear was setting into the heart of the Dragon but it was keeping him from suffocating on his own hate.  
"Going loud", the trap master declared, thinking that this might be her chance to knock off the Dragon from his place of power and thus finally become her own master.  
A master of minds, she thought, perhaps there is a title in that. Master mine? Good names remained something the trap master had a hard time coming up with.  
Then she realized none of her bombs were working right. They had all somehow been compromised without setting off a one of her failsafes or warning systems. She had been supremely confident that she was the only one who could have done this. There had been all kinds of tricks and traps hidden in every one of those devices, not to mention the various forms of laser trip-wires and sonic proximity sensors wire that had been used to ensure that any effort at tampering would result in a detonation. She thought it would have required the combined efforts of herself and Oni Lee to do something like this, even if they had taken half an hour at it.  
"Shit" said the trap master just before one of her pain inducing bombs went off right next to her own head. This rendered her unconscious for the next 16 hours. She did shit, and also piss, herself in this time, which was disgusting. However, other than the fact she would be heading towards a lifetime imprisonment without hope of escape upon waking, these indignities could be forgotten and left in the past. This was a very merciful exit for her, considering what she had done.  
The Dragon had been spared the pain of the blast by the happenstance of the blast radius being small and his underling effectively providing a blast shield with her strang helmet. He immediately realized that he was being forced into submission by some higher power. Perhaps he was being killed by the angel of death, first seen in Switzerland, but he would not just wait for death to find him.  
His path of escape lead him directly to the hero.  
The thin creature was clad in dark material. Upon their head was a strange helmet, the face of it was like dark glass without any way to lift a visor or otherwise reveal the eyes of the wearer. Indeed, one would need to spend some time studying the helmet to find the asymmetrical set of buttons that had to be depressed to remove it without just ripping it off, possibly with the hero's head still inside. The body suit seemed to look like high end cyclist leathers, this leather not being dyed the color black but instead having been made from the skin of some night monster that was truly alien to the planet Earth before May 15th 1982.  
That date is, of course, five days before when it would have been in a different story, and five days difference can change a lot.  
The hero stole the Dragon's strength from him; in a high and somewhat frightened voice the hero said, "So, you gonna piss yourself too now?"  
The Dragon roared like a man who had been insulted one too many times; he would seek to kill this intruder with his own human hands, with the power of his own body, a MAN would kill this monster, he decided. If he could not even seek to be a dragon, he would pour the hate into his own two fits and bash that helmet to sand, rip out the eyes of the child inside, and take shits in their skull.  
That last outburst made the Dragon finally fall out of the control of the man known as Lung, and go over the hero. The hero then made a small gesture at the japanese man who had lost his dragno-self. Fires, as if from hell, sprang up around him.  
"PRT is coming now, called them when I opened the window," the hero said, as they finally removed the helmet like someone who had planned for this moment for too long, "you'll find that they can identify you from your tattoos, so it should be interesting to see if they still put you in the birdcage. Personally, I doubt you will last a day there," finally her big eyes and wide mouth could be seen, her curled hair that had been cut short to ensure the helmet would not have any problems,  
And thus Taylor Herbert got justice for her lover Brian as best she could. Lung had killed Grue, but she was not going to return death with death. Not when she could return it with something more cruel and not when she could let others do it for her.  
She also knew that if Kenta died, the Dragon would sleep just like the intuition, the darkness, the biological armoring, and the body manipulation powers she had been borrowing before had gone away when Lung killed Tattletale, Grue, Bitch (AKA Rachel), and Regent.  
They were excellent friends and amazing allies to her, but she had been too afraid to always be by them.  
Perhaps Taylor Herbert, the queen of all living powers, was always meant to rule alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this, I do not really have plans for expanding upon it since the setting as a whole does not support where I would want to take the concepts.


End file.
